Summertime Reading

Why do the Weekend supplements always concentrate on fiction and biography books to take away with you, when every foodlover knows that it is cookery books that provide the best reading, and the most practical application, especially if you are renting a house and self-catering. Here is the Megabytes Summer Reading List:

Richard Olney: Simple French Food

(Grub Street 14.99 sterling)

In my opinion, writes John McKenna, "Simple French Food" is the greatest work of culinary writing ever published, challenged in its pinnacle position only by Patience Gray's extraordinary "Honey from a Weed".

Richard Olney is at risk of being forgotten, following his death almost four years ago. During his lifetime, he was a cult writer, but never gained a mass audience. He was an intensely private man, who was also seriously hospitable: we were just one couple invited to share lunch with him at his house in the hills above the little village of Sollies-Toucas, in Provence. Olney is unique, also, in that he was as fine a writer on the subject of wine as he was on food, and he saw the two as being inextricably interlinked.

The single book on which Olney's cult reputation will rest is Simple French Food. His other books are all masterly, and you can cook from them for a lifetime, but SFF is extraordinary in every way; the Proustian sentences that wend and wind around the descriptions and instructions; the incredible creativity and imagination of the food itself, the exultation in the good gifts of the land, the 'sensuous-sensual-spiritual' world summoned here in the name of great cooking and great eating.

Grub Street have given the new edition a fine cover, and replicated the text style from the most recent Penguin edition. Even if you never cook from this book, you will be enchanted by its elegant prose. But the moment you cook from it, you will find yourself in the spell of one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Buy from Amazon online

Sybil Kapoor: Taste

(Mitchell Beazley 20 sterling)

Here is the simple benchmark of a great book: Does everything you cook from it work? Does it intrigue you? Do you learn from it? Do you want to cook it again?

Sybil Kapoor's masterly book scores yes, yes, yes, yes every time. This is a great, complex and involving thesis on the basic elements of food and cooking, a systematic examination of the principles of sour, sweet, salt, bitter and umami, the tastes that are the fundamental building blocks of our cooking. Everything we have cooked from this book has been not only delicious, but excitingly delicious, a smart exegesis of the currencies of taste and flavour. Alongside Diana Henry's classic Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, this is one of the best and most imaginative of the new cookery titles.

Buy from Amazon online

Ursula Ferrigno: Italy Sea to Sky & Truly Madly Pasta

Ursula Ferrigno: Italy Sea to Sky (Mitchell Beazley 20 sterling), &: Truly Madly Pasta (Quadrille, 18.99 sterling)

With the simultaneous paperback appearance of 'Truly Italian' these two new books make up a trio of Ursula Ferrigno titles to appear this month. Boy, but this girl woks hard, her output matched only by her regular photographic collaborator, the splendid Jason Lowe.
The food is truly of the moment: light, flavourful, overwhelmingly vegetarian, straightforward and serenely good for you. Ms Ferrigno takes classic recipes from the pasta repertoire for Truly Madly Pasta, cramming in 150 ideas, whilst Sea to Sky celebrates the cooking of the islands, coasts, rivers, mountains, forests and plains of Italy; the cities and towns don't get a look in. If you are a Marcella Hazan devotee, then these stylish books probably won't convert you from Signora Hazan's classic efforts, but these are spirited and ingenious books that suit the way we cook and eat today, with Sea to Sky, in particular, revealing a lot of fascinating food.

Buy Italy Sea to Sky from Amazon online

and

Buy Truly Madly Pasta from Amazon online